Tech

Pocket Turns 1, Adds New 'Share to Friend' Feature

One year ago Read It Later officially changed its name to Pocket. Originally a service for just saving online articles to read later, along with the name change Pocket also added the ability to save other types of content, such as images, videos and recipes. The service also became free for users.

In the past year the company has expanded to several new platforms: Mac, Chrome and Safari. Pocket users now save an astounding 35 million items per month, and the service’s network of developers and publishers has grown to close to 12,000.

To help celebrate its birthday, Pocket is adding a new Send to Friend feature Wednesday. The update — which will launch on iPhone, iPad, Android and Mac — brings a completely redesigned Share Menu to the service, highlighting your most recently used services such as Twitter, Facebook, Buffer or Evernote.

Send to Friend lets you add a comment or highlight a quote in content you send to friends via email. If your friend has Pocket, they’ll receive a notification of your share in the app, if they don’t, they receive you message via a link in their inbox. Pocket users can also opt to receive share messages via push notification.

13 Alternative Ways to Consume Your News

1. Flipboard

The original social media magazine for iPad, Flipboard initially wowed tablet users with a touch-based interface for browsing status updates as news stories.

Flipboard has since gone on to raise an additional $50 million in funding at a $200 million valuation, sign content partnerships with major media organizations, and be named Apple's iPad application of the year for 2010.

Flipboard continues to push the envelop with even more content partners, Instagram integration, faster loading content and an ever-improving user interface.

2. Zite

iPad magazine Zite is a free application that tailors stories to your needs and gets smarter with continual usage.

Like Flipboard, Zite can pull stories from your Twitter or Google Reader accounts. It also lets you select topics of interest to add to your magazine. The app's claim to fame, however, is its ability to learn from your reading habits and serve up stories that are meaningful to you.

For some, Zite will be a welcome, more intelligent application for discovering news. For others, the application's simple interface -- especially when compared against Flipboard -- will deter users from ever having the meaningful experience its makers intended.

3. News.me

News.me is the social news reading application for iPad developed by Betaworks and The New York Times Company. It's similar in purpose and style to Flipboard and Zite, but has the support of more than 20 major media organizations.

News.me's uniqueness is drawn from its ability to help you discover what the people you follow on Twitter are seeing in their streams, so long as they're also using News.me. The application is touch-based and allows you to "stretch" a story to peek at its contents.

The iPad application comes with a considerable price tag -- $0.99 per week or $34.99 per year, after an initial free week. By comparison, Flipboard and Zite are entirely free.

4. Smartr

Smartr is an iPhone, iPad, Android and web app for news junkies. It strips out spam from social streams to make a personalized newspaper out of your friends' Twitter and Facebook updates.

Smartr, which comes from startup Factyle, is essentially a news-only Facebook and Twitter client. It uses natural language processing to pluck out relevant status updates. It then optimizes the text, images and video in the updates for consumption on iPhone, iPad, Android or the web.

5. LinkedIn Today

LinkedIn Today is the professional social network's take on a social newspaper for business readers. The 2-month-old web and mobile product aggregates and delivers news personalized to you.

LinkedIn Today features stories that people are sharing on LinkedIn and Twitter. You can add to the personalization of the paper by selecting to follow industries and news sources.

6. Pulse

Pulse is an iPhone, iPad and Android social news application from Alphonso Labs. What first started as a college project at Stanford is now a sophisticated application for consuming content from publishers, RSS feeds and social media services such as Facebook and Twitter.

Pulse recently prettied up its mobile apps by including another six popular social media sites. The app now grabs Reddit, Digg, Vimeo, YouTube, Picplz and Flickr content via APIs, so you can watch videos, pan through photos and discover trending news items.

7. FLUD

FLUD is a free personalized news reader for iPhone and iPad that directly competes with Pulse.

The startup defines itself as a social news ecosystem. It's yet to fully grow into that definition, but it does offer an elegant experience for consuming news from your preferred RSS sources, as organized into categories.

FLUD is working to firm up content partnerships with publishers and will use its new funding to finance development of Android and desktop applications.

8. Utopic

Utopic surfaces the trending links, videos, music, photos, events and movies as shared by your social connections on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

The type of content you see in Utopic is elastic in nature. The app factors in your activity, the content your friends and friends of friends are sharing, and global trends across all users.

Since we last checked in with Utopic just two months ago, the startup has made a slew of improvements. You can now choose from 10 categories including sports, politics, travel and technology. Categories enable you to filter social news items and help you discover more Utopic-suggested content.

Utopic's user interface is also much-enhanced and now functions nicely on tablets and mobile devices, albeit in the browser and not in a native app experience.

9. Instapaper

Instapaper, a service for saving articles to read later, offers Kindle, iPad, iPhone and web users a way to consume news on their own time.

The 3-year-old tool has matured beyond its humble bookmarklet beginnings to become integrated into many of the web's most popular apps and services. Now, wherever you consume your online news, you're likely to find a "Read Later" button for saving stories to Instapaper, making it an indispensable news reader thanks to its more than one million members.

10. Read It Later (Digest)

Much like Instapaper, Read It Later is a tool for saving articles and web pages to read later on the web or via mobile application.

Digest (pictured), a $4.99 iPad in-app upgrade, restructures and sorts your reading list by topic in a view that resembles the magazine style pioneered by Flipboard.

11. PostPost

PostPost's web app pulls in news, links, videos and photos from Facebook. You can view all types of content together or navigate to a specific section -- think pictures or videos -- of your personalized paper.

The service's Facebook integration allows for Facebook "Liking," sharing and commenting as well.

12. XYDO

XYDO's web app organizes and personalizes online news by tapping into your social graph and interests. It also collects news from tens of thousands of online sources and matches articles to what other users are sharing on Facebook and Twitter.

The end result is a list of news ranked by popularity, as determined by social shares and on-site up votes. You can choose to filter stories by community (topic) and connections.

13. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is an oldie but a goodie. It allows for the serendipitous discovery of news, photos, videos and websites via web, mobile or tablet.

Launched in 2001, StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay in 2007 and then purchased back by its original investors in 2009. Now a startup once again, StumbleUpon is showing that it can iterate quickly and compete with newer innovations and trendier startups in the social information discovery space. Plus, its mobile apps, released last year, are helping it to grow substantially -- it's now serving up 1 billion stumbles and counting per month.

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